“Do we make real readers of our students?” was the anxious question of a college president. I remembered his phrase when I read his annual report. “Most of these young people,” he said, “are to go out into ordinary life, into general pursuits, where the one chance of their maintaining their intellectual growth will come through stimulating them in these years to interest in some particular line which they may continue, in the midst of the general pressure of social, domestic, or professional life. Unless a student learn to read and love books, she will, in a large majority of cases, be thrown out of all relation to resources that are in any fair sense of the word intellectual.” He pleaded that to make a girl a real reader is to safeguard her intellectual life.
A student leaves college, not perhaps having read much, but knowing what she wants to read. Her education has been an appetizer; now she is invited to partake of the banquet.
“May good digestion wait on appetite,
And health on both.”
The hunger for books no doubt began with many of you as soon as you had learned your alphabet. It was very likely hereditary. Indeed, the ideal way to become a lover of books is to be, like Mary Lamb, “tumbled at an early age into a spacious closet of good old English reading.” Fortunate for you, if you have had a grandfather who reluctantly puts off his reading-glasses as dinner is announced, or a grandmother who hides a book in her work-basket. For the real reader has a book close by; he does not walk across the room for it. If your busy father and mother still find time to read a new book and talk about it, then you and your brother Dick will be readers, and you will never know why. Reading is the most catching thing in the world. When school and college shall have added their stimulus, the prospect is good for a “full-blooded reader.”
If a girl should not come out of a reading home, it may be hoped that she will fall into the hands of a book-loving teacher. There are two women in the American town who are to be envied for their opportunity: one is the teacher of “Literature” in the High School, and the other is the librarian of the Public Library. Both may say, in words of the Oriental proverb, “I will make thee to love literature, thy mother; I will make its beauties to pass before thee.”
“Greedy of books,”—so Petrarch described himself; and he himself was the first great reader of modern times. I like these metaphors of the body applied to reading. The books that feed the mind, the nourishing books, are they not the ones that last and live? The hunger for books has its rhythm like the hunger for meat. Observe that the real reader reads regularly,—he has to. The regularity is unconscious: a healthy appetite does not keep one eye on the clock. The healthy reader feels faint and hollow for lack of nourishment: he seeks a book and he is content.
He reads from the simplest motives: in fact, he is a rather irresponsible person. He reads for the sense of life: he eats to live, he reads to live. He is not fiercely following up a subject; he is not pursuing references. That is another field of reading, which has its necessary and stimulating part in the intellectual life. Reading to order is indispensable to a student’s work; but the fear is, lest “reading up” may leave no time for reading. “I get no time to read,” is about the most disheartening thing I hear from college boys and girls. A university librarian said the other day that in their freshman year, students drew books from the library for general reading, but after that year no student entered the library unless obliged to. I found a high school boy working out a problem about pressures and resistances; he looked up gleefully, “This isn’t for school; this is for myself!” It is reading for yourself, reading for fun, that I am pleading for.
Yet you, too, say that there is no time in college for reading. I assure you there is a great deal more time than you think there is. What are the things that you might just as well not have done to-day? One of the busiest of men, Matthew Arnold, wrote: “The plea that this or that man has no time for culture will vanish as soon as we desire culture so much that we begin to examine seriously our present use of our time. Give to any man all the time that he now wastes, on useless business, wearisome or deteriorating amusements, trivial letter-writing, random reading, and he will have plenty of time for culture. Some of us waste all our time, most of us waste much of it, but all of us waste some.”
Culture was in my youth a word to conjure with. Somehow of late it has become separated from education and almost opposed to it. Culture is suspected by one of being dilettante, by another, of being selfish. Let us have a reconciliation of education and culture, and see that they go on together.
The real reader is active, not passive. There are people who look upon a book as that which best brings on an afternoon nap: something for the dull hours of the day, to quiet one’s nerves, “to take one’s mind off.” Much writing does appear to have been done for tired people. Real reading, however, is not a stop-gap. We should take up a book while the mind has a good grip and can do its part.
As you who are city-bred ride from end to end of this country, through prairie villages, mountain hamlets, valley towns, you wonder what makes these out-of-the-world places habitable. But I assure you, that prairie town is not so dead a level as it looks, for there is a woman’s club, and there is a public library, and there are young people going to college. It is books that make such places habitable.
The real reader is fortified against solitude, even that worst of solitudes, a company in which he dare not speak of a book. Books prepare you to live in strange places, as often falls to the lot of the American woman. You may marry a missionary or an army officer; you may go to the Klondike or the Philippines. “You could set that woman down anywhere,” said a mourning widower, in praise of his departed wife. You can set the real reader down anywhere. For one small matter, it is something to be made independent of weather!
The reader, grown old, has youth at his beck and can forget the passage of years. Place is no more to him than time; he is master of his fate. Reading, also, is “the poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release.”
Our reader is patient; he will put up with a good deal from his author,—as for instance, when he reads Meredith or Browning. He is patient of dullness as well as of eccentricity. Lowell’s “dogged reading” has to go to the ripened experience of the trained reader: it is required of him that he do a certain amount of unprofitable reading in the forming of his critical judgment.
He must be patient and he must be calm. Quick and complete absorption is the mark of the happy reader. He is sincere and he is modest; his reading is not for show.
Common sense tells the reader when and where he may talk about books. Happy the family that read the same books: happier still the family that can talk about them! Love of reading is the best safeguard against gossip, and against excessive talking. One woman of your acquaintance fills every gap with talk; another fills the pauses of the day with reading.
In this country that boasts no class distinctions, we, nevertheless, have a class at the very top: the privileged caste of readers. What a freemasonry there is among them! They “speak the same language”; they toss about allusions; they dare to quote to one another; they take worlds for granted. But if you belong to this aristocracy, beware of snobbishness. The snobbishness of culture is the most contemptible of all, for culture knows better. The other “snobbishness” is based on pure ignorance of the true values of life, and has so far excuse.
People of moderate means probably make the best readers, because they have the largest share of rational leisure. The very poor and the very rich know not leisure, and its graces and benefactions. “Give me neither poverty nor riches”—such would be the best condition for the intellectual life. Miss Jeannette Gilder once drew a pleasant picture: as she passed along a Boston street of a winter evening, she noted the friendly custom of leaving up the window shades, and letting the light and cheer of the home shine forth upon the wayfarer. But to her New York eyes it was a striking fact that these Boston families sat reading by the evening lamp; that appeared to be their regular nightly occupation. She carried away the feeling that the good old Boston of Emerson and Lowell and Longfellow was not altogether vanished.
A bookless home! Was ever such suggestion of dreariness! The reader, if he own anything, will own some books. They need not be many. Some of the greatest readers have had but a modest number. Those few volumes go far to furnish your home. No wall covering is so rich. When the western light strikes across your bookshelves,—and no library should be without its western window,—the blended colors of those goodly volumes convey the charm of even the outside of literature. I like Montaigne’s way of saying, “As soon as I was able, I hired a spacious house in the city, for myself and books; where I again, with rapture, resumed my literary pursuits.” “A house for myself and books!”
No; your books need not be many. They will be more to you if you have made sacrifices for their sake,—as Charles Lamb did in the days when his purchase was not merely a purchase, but nothing short of a victory. If you own but few books, you will know the pleasures of re-reading. You will find the second reading fixes a book, gives you its essence and its true proportions. Yet it is rather the intimacies and friendships among books re-read that I have in mind, when they become all interwoven with endearing memories and associations. Every ten years you become a wiser reader and turn a new light upon your author. I imagine three tests of a book: do you read it aloud?—do you give it away?—but above all, do you read it a second time?
Your reading should have much variety, ranging from the newspapers to the great poets. Of course we must know what the great world is about and must live in our own age; but the little world of the newspapers let us waste no time upon. Said Matthew Arnold again: “Reading a good book is a discipline such as no reading of even good newspapers can ever give.” Scrappy reading makes scrappy minds, for it destroys power of attention.
I believe that there should be a backbone of History throughout your lifetime of reading. Be sure to choose first-rate historical books; never waste yourself upon second-rate histories. Biography, I am aware, is middle-aged reading; and I can only promise you immense pleasure from it when you are past forty. Those large, heavy volumes in dull bindings, which did not invite your youth, will become alive and significant, and full of good society.
I have never a seen college girl who did not enjoy reading essays, whatever her sentiment about writing them. Essays, too, are good society, the companionship of fine minds giving you their best. This literary form, with its modest, careless name, has yet the widest range in all literature. Nothing human is alien to it. If you read “for the sense of life,” a good essay will give you precisely that.
Books of travel are especially good to read after you have traveled. One glimpse of the Old World, for example, gives you the clue, the key, which makes books and pictures intelligible to the imagination ever after. When once you have this clue, you can read far beyond your own travels. And while you are on the road, do a little reading day by day,—Henry James’s “Little Tour in France” while you are making that very tour; Hawthorne’s “Our Old Home,” while you, too, are in England. In foreign lands read a newspaper of the country, and read a novel by its best writer of fiction.
Said that fine old novel-reader, Professor Jowett, of Baliol, when he was writing to a young lady, “Have you thoroughly made yourself up in Miss Austen and the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’? No person is educated who doesn’t know them.” Good fiction educates not only the intellect but the heart. It enriches the imagination and the sympathies, and “teaches us to walk not by sight but by insight.” This is fiction fair, and with fiction foul, why should we concern ourselves?
“Who reads poetry nowadays?” people are asking miserably. My real reader, I answer with confidence. He must have poetry, and why he must, Richard Crashaw’s friend said once for all in the quaint preface to the poet’s verses: “Maist thou take a poem hence and tune thy soul by it into a heavenly pitch.”
Another old writer once described the four classes of readers: “Sponges which attract all without distinguishing; hour-glasses which receive and pour out as fast; bags which only retain the dregs, and let the wine escape; and sieves which retain the best only.” I am now, of course, addressing the sieves. Real readers need not take high moral ground about trash; they are simply bored by it. A publisher said the other day that he must publish a certain amount of trash in order to be able to publish some good books. He needs a body of better readers. Mediocre readers make mediocre books.
Superior people, however, are often disloyal to their own standards. You are, for example, untrue to yourself, if you sit at a theater assisting—admirable French word!—at a play that your whole soul rejects. It is like a breach of faith to read a book which is moral trash or literary trash. No mind is safe from the suggestion of such plays or such books. Said Fielding, “We are as liable to be corrupted by books as by companions.” Happily it is just as true that we are as liable to be purified by books as by companions.
To be quite fair, we must acknowledge some dangers of reading. You remember Kipling’s bank clerk, who in a previous incarnation had been a Viking, and who might have written tales as good as Kipling’s own had he not been so steeped in English literature. I have known people who had plainly been dulled by over-reading: they were the “sponges” of our old writer. Over every book we should think at least as long a time as we spend in the reading. I notice the real reader frequently looks up and off from his book, to think the better.
Ask from your book not only ideas, but style. Careless readers have permitted slipshod books. The writer says to himself, “This is quite good enough for the people who are likely to read it.” He is fond of the simile of the pearls and the swine, confident that it is the swine who have thwarted his genius. Real readers help to make real writers.
Who are some of the real readers we have known? There is Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford. He owned books, poor as he was; he kept them at the head of his bed; and there you have two unfailing marks of the real reader. (I even like that dash of color,—the “black or red” of his bindings; for the real reader loves the outside of his book as well.)
I think of Milton, who made the most beautiful definition of a book I know—“the precious life-blood of a master spirit, treasured up on purpose to a Life beyond Life.” None but a real reader could have so nobly imagined the book and its author.
When Keats read Chapman’s Homer and said that a new planet swam into his ken, he expressed for all readers the sense of surprise, of discovery, and of acquisition when they have found a real book.
Into this noble fellowship you and I are allowed to enter, as we leave our college.